With Office 365, there’s no reason to compromise

A lot is said these days about the choices people and organizations are faced with when adopting technology. In the end, it’s all about productivity. All of these decisions are made with the aim of optimizing your productivity — whether you’re a stay-at-home mom, accountant, student, or business person.

As people navigate these decisions, their ability to do great work revolves around having the right mix of capabilities delivered by a company they can trust. Why? Because there’s an actual cost to compromising our productivity. There’s a cost to the time and money spent retraining workers to use unfamiliar applications and applications that don’t do what people need them to do or that require workarounds.There’s a cost to having to purchase add-on technologies to gain the capabilities you need to be successful. And there’s a cost associated with the inability to access the information that’s important to you simply because you don’t have an Internet connection.

At Microsoft, we have the broadest vision of productivity, which is inclusive of capabilities like enterprise content management and business intelligence with SharePoint, electrifying data analysis and visualization with Excel,and rich applications that enable people to do their best work. We understand that, in the face of an evolving technology arena, what it takes to maximize productivity has evolved as well.

With Office 365, we’ve combined the world’s most familiar desktop experience and enterprise-class server tools with robust security and privacy. The result is an experience that lights up social, is optimized for pen, touch, mouse and keyboard, and is recognized as a market leader in eight Gartner Magic Quadrants.

Customers are choosing Office 365 over Google Apps

With Office 365, they don’t have to. They get the familiarity of Office + the capabilities they need + a cloud service they can trust. The result is a cloud-based service that enables businesses to meet customer needs and gain a competitive edge.

Among the recent companies that have switched to Office 365 after deploying or piloting Google Apps are Arysta LifeScience, SEPCOIII, FHI 360, and Sensia Hälsovård AB. These companies join numerous other organizations that tried Google Apps only to switch to Office 365.

Dissatisfaction with Google Apps

Again and again, companies that deploy Google Apps say they are frustrated by the experience and want a cloud-based service they can count on. Take Arysta LifeScience, for example. An agrochemical company with sales and service in more than 125 countries, Arysta LifeScience until recently supported 34 different email solutions around the world. The company wanted to standardize on a cloud-based email service and initially chose Google Apps for Business. However, employees were unhappy with the user interface, and IT struggled with compatibility issues.

After deploying Google Apps to 300 of its 3,400 users, the company reversed its decision and instead went with Office 365. “If we had moved everyone to Google, the ability to work offline would have been very limited,” says Dustin Collins, the company’s Head of Global IT Infrastructure. By contrast, “Microsoft meets the needs of an enterprise, with the right levels of privacy and data security better than Google, which is more consumer-oriented,” Collins says. “And, with Office 365, you get a complete suite of collaboration services including IM, so everyone was enthusiastic about the decision.”

Likewise, the China-based energy company SEPCOIII initially used Gmail for external communication, but employees found it undependable and cumbersome. “Gmail was very unreliable, and employees were losing email,” says Pradeep Parmar, Director of Management Information Systems for SEPCOIII. “Employees were frustrated that the company didn’t have a stable, reliable email solution.”

The company decided to standardize on Office 365 for its Dubai regional office, and plans to move all 5,800 employees by the end of 2013. “We are so relieved to be using Office 365,” Pradeep says. “It’s a great platform that we can rely on.”

Office 365: A top value service

Companies that switch from Google Apps to Office 365 say they now have an enterprise-class solution that offers top value for their money. For example, when the Academy for Educational Development (AED) and the nonprofit FHI came together to form FHI 360, the approximately 2,000 AED employees were using Google Docs and Gmail, while the 2,000 employees within FHI were using on-premises Microsoft solutions.

After analyzing both Google Apps and Office 365, FHI 360 eventually decided to deploy all of its employees on Office 365. The company chose Office 365 based on several factors including the ability to work offline, robust calendaring, support for mobile users, and the “superior” level of support offered.

“Using Microsoft Office 365, we are a more cohesive, efficient organization,” says Michael Mazza, Head of Information Solutions and Services for FHI 360. “Empowered with tools that work the way we work, FHI 360 can achieve a greater impact on human development around the world.”

Similarly, the Swedish-based private healthcare provider Sensia Hälsovård AB implemented Office 365 even though 30 percent of its workforce had already been using Google Gmail. As a result of a series of acquisitions over a two-year period, the company had seven different IT systems, which made communication a big problem because there was no common distribution list. The company wanted a single communication and collaboration platform and decided on Office 365 over Google Apps. “Gmail wasn’t intuitive to use, and when employees got stuck, it was difficult for them to obtain support,” says Anders Franzen, IT Strategist for Sensia Hälsovård AB.

With Office 365, communication has “improved tremendously” and the support “has been excellent,” according to Franzen. “Already, Office 365 is increasing staff productivity, which means less time sitting at the computer and more time serving patients,” he says.

Productivity without compromise

Like Arysta LifeScience, SEPCOIII, FHI 360, and Sensia Hälsovård AB, numerous companies around the world have concluded that it doesn’t make sense to compromise when they can power their organizations with Office 365.

Join the conversation

So, if I have an Android or iOS tablet, can I work with Office files natively in Office on those devices on Office 365? No? So I need to compromise and use the browser on those devices (painful). Or, just switch to Google…

Hi Derik – Always pleased to see one of Google’s partners reading our Office 365 blog. With regard to your comments, you may have missed Jake Zborowski’s post last Friday which helped customers understand just how frustrating customers find it to work with rich Office files in Google Docs across platforms, devices and browsers (http://bit.ly/10noOyH). The experience just does not stand up to what Office 365 delivers. Whether users are using the desktop applications or the web apps, one thing customers know they will get from Office 365 is file fidelity across all the platforms and devices we support. This support includes a growing list as noted recently by our blog on Web Apps roadmaps (http://bit.ly/17Ktt3K) which reflected that we’ll be adding support for Chrome on Android tablets in the coming year. In Jake’s second blog, he highlighted how Google continues to provide a limited set of capabilities which fails to meet business needs (http://bit.ly/15wCWyx). The gaps are untenable for many customers and, unfortunately for many, often don’t surface until they switch to Google and see the productivity of the workforce decrease. Once those gaps, inconsistencies and broken productivity experiences surface, we see customers, like those in this blog, switch to Office 365.

Michael, Oh, I saw the post, and again, very misleading. Check out our blog later this week for our take on what you consider "file fidelity across all the platforms". It’s just not true. As an example, I had a customer who "just assumed" fidelity in Office 365 "worked". I encouraged them to test it for themselves. They did test if for themselves and signed with Google 2 days later.